Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday May 10, 2012 @08:00PM
from the education-screen dept.

bonch writes "DVDs and Blu-Rays will begin displaying two unskippable anti-piracy screens, each 10 seconds long, shown back-to-back. Six studios have agreed to begin using the new notices. Of course, pirated versions won't contain these 20-second notices; however, an ICE spokesman says the intent isn't to deter piracy but to educate the public."

Of course these taxes don't actually entitle you to copy stuff that you don't already own but hey, it wouldn't be corruption and lobbyism if it would benefit anybody but a few select assholes.

Not exactly. In the Netherlands you are allowed to create copies of works for private use (Thuiskopie [wikipedia.org](dutch for home copy)), even for works you don't own. This is being payed for by the taxes on empty media. These taxes make it very hard for copyright-lobbyists to make private copies illegal.

This is also why downloading content for private use is not illegal in The Netherlands, as long as you don't upload (so bittorrent is illegal for pirated works).

This is one of the reasons we rip every DVD to our media server as soon as we buy it. No unskippable bits, no insults from FBI warnings or other time wasting, just the movie or set of episodes or videos that we paid for. There are a couple of drawers full of disks that are no longer needed for viewing (kept as backup and as proof of purchase). Another reason for ripping stuff to the server is simple convenience: not having to dig around for the right disk and stuff it in a mechanical device to play, hoping it has not gotten scratched through handling.

DVD's are a valuable means of delivering advertisements along with product. However, in order for the ads to be valuable, the users must be forced to watch them. So, making the content unskipable is a major selling point of the format to content producers.

The fact that consumers hate it does not matter, consumers will buy it anyway since there are no ad-free alternatives at all (the force of law ensures that there are no other options, and it works perfectly).

Because DVDs are encrypted. To play a DVD (Without breaking the encryption, which is illegal in most of the world) requires a license from the DVDCCA, who then supply the appropriate key. This license imposes a number of conditions regarding what a DVD player may and may not do, one of which is respecting the can't-skip-this feature. It also requires players respect region lockout, specifies some anti-tamper requirements, prohibits digital outputs without encryption (only video, SPDIF is fine) and things like that. The DVDCCA has gotten quite lax in enforcement now because they realise that with CSS broken there isn't much point.

Blu-ray runs in exactly the same manner. If you want to (legally) play, you need a license. The license mandates the rest of the DRM, such as requiring HDCP on output.

Exactly correct. The two 10-second pieces of unskippable "educational" content will serve only to annoy those people who legally purchased the DVD and Bluray discs. Those who acquire illegal copies will not be subject to such annoyances.

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That sounds like a good plan to me if the goal is to push paying customers away.

Exactly correct. The two 10-second pieces of unskippable "educational" content will serve only to annoy those people who legally purchased the DVD and Bluray discs. Those who acquire illegal copies will not be subject to such annoyances.

That sounds like a good plan to me if the goal is to push paying customers away.

Yes and no. I (and I think many/.'ers are similar to me in this regard) do get annoyed by this sort of thing, yet I am also inclined to support the entertainment that I enjoy. As a result, I do in fact go out and buy the shows that I like to watch to send a (I know it is meager) message to the content creators "Hey, this makes you money. Make more of THIS." but I do come home, transcode it to a nice file without all the rubbish advertising and crap "announcements" that they put on the loading sectors of discs. I was quite amused by Startgate SG1 for example, but towards the latter half of the series, each time I inserted a disc, forcing me to watch (I kid you not) A Fox? Studios advertisment, followed by a trailer for Startgate Contimuum, then a trailer for the Stargate video game, then an advertisement for Stargate Altantis, then an anti-piracy message? Give me a break. If I am buying the damned discs, you have made your money and let me enjoy my content already.

So while I do enjoy feeling good about supporting the entertainment that I enjoy, the taste is often more and more bitter. The only upside is that some content providers seem to get the message and skip anything like that. From a pragmatic point of view, I think that actually makes me enjoy that more as I am no longer associating that show with forced advertising.

Interesting that you had those problems with SG-1. I'm in the UK, and actually found those DVDs to be relatively sane in the amount of junk shoved on the front; almost everything could be skipped.

(Aside: I don't think there's any excuse for making anything unskippable, and I think using patents to lock down DVD players so no-one can sell one that ignores the no-skip instruction on the disc even though there is clearly an ample market for such a device is an excellent argument for nullifying that kind of patent entirely, but that's another story.)

I wonder how much of this is going to be locale-based rather than universal, if they're already doing different things on different regions' DVDs (I assume). Then again, I get particularly irritated by having to sit through copyright-related junk at the start of the DVD that doesn't even apply to me because it's based on copyright laws in another country, so obviously not everything is localised for my market (UK).

Yet you do admit that the added annoyances bother you and that you remove them from your viewing.

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My point is that/. represents a minority of the world. Yes, you can rip and stream the DVD without the annoyances, but what about most people?

I am not opposed to supporting the entertainment industry. I just have to wonder why the entertainment industry seems to be in the business of pissing off their legitimate customers? Why is the entertainment industry driving their prospective customers to the pirate industry which provides a better, i.e., less annoying, product?

There is a Fox executive not yet ground into Executive Powder who is listening, he is listening to the caching of the cash register as your dollar votes come into the Fox bank account. You voted, in favor! Good for you and you can be sure he is listening and coming up with more ads for you to watch next time.

What has to be remembered is that customer relations is a very young field that is barely researched. For most businesses, they translate a sale to a positive customer experience. It is in reality possible for a customer to use a company time and time again, in fact to totally depend on them and STILL hate its guts. This goes anywhere from users of public transport to haters of big government using government handouts (is that you bankers?) and everything in between.

You buy their product, so they reason you must love them. You don't but how are they supposed to know? Nobody in their offices is going to tell the boss he is an idiot and that you a purchasing customer are hating the product you bought of your own free will with your hard earned money, they would look silly and not be in line for promotion and bonuses.

I have actually had to deal with these kinds of things as an underling, the disconnect is amazing. From transport companies that wanted people to give unfiltered twitter feedback on their home page, to advertising campaigns where the only message to reach the consumer would be that they are paying for ad support for things they hate on a product they have no choice to buy from that company whose prices have gone up (water companies in Europe).

You think some are getting the message but allowing you to skip it... NO THEY ARE NOT GETTING IT. If they got it, the ads wouldn't even be needed to be skipped, they would at most be an optional to the side extra. WHY do you think a company gets it if it thinks it can shove advertising on an already paid for product?

See how much you have been conditioned already? You are like a girl who thinks she found a new age modern man because he only beats her with his bare hands! Just because your new owner doesn't use the whip as often does not mean you are now free slave.

That sounds like a good plan to me if the goal is to push paying customers away.

That!

I found myself watching less and less purchased content after the "warnings" and the interminable previews. To the point where I haven't bought anything for 4 or so years now. It's just too much a PITA.

And it's silly too, which is part of the issue. How many people don't know that it is illegal to copy and sell copyrighted videos? Finally, it's such a nice treat to get a threat of fines or imprisonment. Wow - these movies are dangerous stuff! No thanks, I'll just watch whatever is on the net that is free, not really any need to do the illegal stuff. And I have more discretionary money now too.

Exactly correct. The two 10-second pieces of unskippable "educational" content will serve only to annoy those people who legally purchased the DVD and Bluray discs. Those who acquire illegal copies will not be subject to such annoyances.

So really they should make a law that all pirated movie copies must have these unskipable warnings.

"No, see, the issue is that people don't know they're not supposed to pirate DVDs."

Right, that's why they want to put a warning on something that you DIDN'T pirate, to tell you that you shouldn't do what you didn't do in the first place, and probably never planned to do... except now they've got you thinking about it... maybe next time you just might!

A lesson to the studios:If you want to deter pirating, make the official and legal copy MORE CONVENIENT than the pirated version.Yes, 20 seconds isn't a lot of time. But every time someone puts in a DVD and has to watch it for the 100th time, they're going to get annoyed. And maybe next time they WON'T buy your product because they feel insulted.We could sit here and argue all night about whether pirating a copy to spite a studio is okay morally (and I'm very, very certain that's what will happen) but at the end of the day it boils down to this, right or wrong: Annoy your customers, and they'll go someplace else, legal or not.

Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.

If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.

20 seconds might be plenty of time for you to do all of that, including fuck, but the rest of us usually sit down to watch a movie after we've done all that (and I for one, last a lot longer than your few seconds... ask your Mom when you see her Sunday).

I'd prefer not to sit there for 20 seconds to be annoyed by messages that, by PAYING FOR THE MOVIE, do not actually apply to me.

Twenty seconds of clock time is not the same as twenty seconds of human time.
Imagine disturbing a heart surgeon for twenty random seconds in the middle of heart surgery.
Imagine disturbing for twenty seconds a poet reading a poem to a thousand people.
Imagine disturbing for five seconds making love to your SO.
The twenty seconds is not the thing, it's the destruction of the movie watching mindset and the hatred that colors thinking for far more than twenty seconds after.the "pick up that can!" message.

What are you talking about? Everyone values their time differently, and not everyone values each second the same way. You seem to think others should value their time in a certain way, and that's not going to happen.

This is absolutely pointless. This is a needless waste of time, and I don't think anyone enjoys it.

Additionally, as others have said, it's also the principle of the matter. And if you keep stacking on negative after negative, it'll eventually be too much for people to stand.

In a nutshell, it's more of a waste of time to gripe about it than to just put up with it. Either that, or go live in your own universe where everything caters to you.

Their criticisms are valid no matter what you think. They're their own feelings.

Oh, and there is an easy way: either pirate the movie, or don't buy it at all. To people sufficiently angered by this, they simply won't buy it.

The point was that 20 seconds isn't actually long enough to do anything else of import anyways

It isn't actually long enough to do much else. However, when you accidentally bump the eject button instead of the pause button and you end up having to wait for the disc to load, followed by that twenty seconds of crap, followed by the time to find where you were, that twenty seconds will make a big difference in how pissed off you get.

It is that sort of experience that has driven me to not buy DVDs from certain companies because of the ads that they make me watch. Now admittedly, that's three or four minutes worth of ads, but it's a slippery slope. The FBI warnings started at about five seconds, and now they're upping it to twenty. If we don't react negatively to this increased annoyance, a few years from now, they'll probably start making us watch one of those obnoxious three minute "You wouldn't steal a box of condoms" ads or whatever the heck they're trying to convince kids to want to steal these days.

Wait, you mean that wasn't meant to make us want to steal a car or a handbag?

I would happily and with a giddy demeanor spend hour upon hour working on a means to avoid ever having to sit through 20 seconds of Australia's never to be sufficiently goddamned "must play this" anti piracy advert. Why? Because my enjoyment of the successful completion of the project, even if it was negative would still be worthwhile in view of the irritation and anger I experience every single time I see that same ad, with the same immensely annoying soundtrack. Right at the start of what is supposed to be entertainment!!!!!. Reliably avoiding that negative experience would vastly increase my enjoyment of the product that I have paid for. Dull, repetitive garbage that treats the customer like a child in need of endless repetition of recording industry lies has no place in entertainment.

They are actively punishing people for purchasing. The length of time of the punishment is not relevant. Pirating it is the only sane option. Paying for punishment is something only a few fetishists participate in.

Google your DVD player model. IIRC my old players 'safeword' was hitting three buttons on the front at the same time. Most of the non-name brand players have this 'feature'. New one came from the factory with noskip disabled.

In my case, I would estimate that they have cut their business from me by more than 50% with their warnings and other abuses. Every time I watch a DVD I am reminded of how much this industry detests me, a paying customer.

They are actively punishing people for purchasing. The length of time of the punishment is not relevant. Pirating it is the only sane option. Paying for punishment is something only a few fetishists participate in.

Yeah, let me get this straight...there are people not buying movies, but by putting an annoying screen on the movies people like me buy, they plan to somehow cause the other guys to start buying them.

The business plan of the studios that signed up to participate is literally:

1. Annoy your paying customers.

2. ???

3. Profit!!!

What actually happened is that they finally managed to make me stop buying movies. There were many close calls before, but this is finally the last straw.

For a human being, you are astonishingly clueless about human psychology. If the cashiers at your favourite store were given new instructions that, upon completion of the transaction with the person before you, they were to stand motionless holding up some inane sign about shoplifting for a full twenty seconds before beginning to assist you, I daresay you would soon find another store to frequent.

Yes, but in this case, there's a cartell of grocery suppliers, and any store that wishes to sell groceries must hold up the the sign for 20 seconds. And if they don't, the U.S. government will kick in the doors with guns.

And people will find other sources. Many of the great falls in business can be attributed to not realizing the willingness of customers to go somewhere else when sufficiently annoyed. And that's the problem: once you piss of those customers, they stay pissed, for a long time.

Irrespective of piracy, the exchange of consideration (paying for the shit) and the receipt of physical product (the fucking dvd) should allow one peaceful enjoyment reasonably expected under the spirit of copyright (those fancy legal entitlements).

I did my part paying for the DVD, and my family owns quite a large number. When Big Media sits there and thinks they can dictate how I enjoy my newly acquired legal rights to enjoy the DVD (the legal agreement between me and Big Media constructed by copyright laws), they have gone too far and become unreasonable.

They have no rational, ethical, or legal position to force me to enjoy the content in any way. That means I can media shift it, apply all the weird filters I want, and even watch the chapters out of order. It especially means I am not forced to watch any extraneous content they may have added.

When they figure out they can't actually control me and I might not act the way they want to (sit through all the bullshit before they want to play the fucking movie), they become abhorrent assholes by creating something called Prohibited User Operations. Really? Prohibit what mother fuckers? You mean I can pay $10 for the DVD and still have prohibitions which is completely contrary to the idea of peaceful enjoyment of one's property?

Now when they realize that I can bypass it and start creating laws like the DMCA and suing people in their delusional states they become enemies of the People.

So.... yeah.... I can bitch and moan about shit like this and base my discontent entirely on principles and not the fact I am inconvenienced by 20 additional seconds. It's the principles involved.

If you can't understand that, then move to someplace like Afghanistan or Pakistan for awhile, because Americans have bitched, moaned, and bled for principles in this country since it was founded.

Afghanistan will be an easy fit for you. "Sheesh.. what's with all these rude, impatient, self important jerks complaining about the Taliban forcing us to have beards? I mean all it takes is sitting back and doing nothing! How easy was that?"

That's 20 seconds, AFTER the 45 or so for the damn thing to boot up, 10 to figure out that there's a disc shoved in it, AFTER 10 minutes of previews for "coming soon" titles that came and went 3 years ago, BEFORE the half-dozen splash screens from all the various production and distribution companies involved with the movie, etc, etc. Conveying the EXACT SAME DAMN information that I saw when I played the last movie, and the one before that, and the one before that.

Yes. It's my money, and as the customer I demand they not put bullshit in just to make me suffer through it.

If they can't manage that, I'll gladly not give them my money. Capitalism is grand.

I'm sorry citizen, but your right to not purchase something vital to a strong national economy and thus vital to national security has been superseded by the Commerce Clause.

Please send Notary-witnessed copies of your US media purchase receipts for this past tax year for verification of your compliance with the Federal Individual Minimum Allowed Yearly Purchase (F-I-MAY-P) including payment for any difference between your receipt totals and the minimum allowable media purchase to the IRS.

Remember, failure to prove compliance with the Federal Minimum Media Purchase requirements carries the same risk of felony prosecution and Federal imprisonment with the same level of severity and sentence-lengths as aggravated Federal income tax evasion.

Failing to make your patriotic media purchases helps the terrorists club baby seals to death with other baby seals for fur they sell to pedophiles to photograph naked children on.

First it's the little warning. Then it's the unskippable lecture. Then it's a required political 'lesson' - starting with something safe, like a reminder that all men must register with Selective Service. And then it becomes required that you cannot rip a legitimate copy without those government-imposed blurbs.

Bad enough there are 20 minutes of unskippable trailers on the friggin' thing, which is why I rip the things in the first place.

For DVDs, I find that DVD::RIP (Ubuntu) is excellent assuming you set it up to use the cluster. It works fast - I can rip the VOB files in around 5-8 minutes per movie and the encoding takes 6-9 minutes (although I can be ripping another movie at that stage), and is pretty easy to get most DVDs done. If you do want some more features, then Handbrake is probably the best featured tool out there and it supports.mkvs with h.264 which makes for excellent quality and features. If I am doing shows, I generally switch to my Windows laptop and use DVD-Decrypter and AutoGK combination. Although a little slower, it has a much better queue function between the two of them. AutoGK also has an excellent "Show only Forced Subtitles" function which is fantastic for movies where you do want subtitles, but only for a few scenes, and not the entire time.

While certain discs do have exceptionally troublesome protection on them, AnyDVD seems to work a charm and also greatly increases the rip time as the ripping software no longer has to decrypt on the fly, but treats the data as having no encryption.

While I haven't tinkered with BR discs yet, I have read that BR on Ubuntu is tedious at the moment, I will eventually start the process up.

As with DRMed music, the pirates will win because they OFFER A BETTER PRODUCT.

The pirates are not what caused the music companies to drop DRM. If it was just the pirates, they'd still be pushing broken DRM just like the movie industry won't quit after CSS and AACS and BD+ and HDCP being broken. The only reason is that Apple was dominating online sales and they refused to license FairPlay, they were getting a monopoly on distribution. The studios couldn't live with that but to get competition they had to drop DRM and start selling regular MP3s and AACs. The music industry surrendered, the movie industry will fight to the very last man. Someone drop a few nukes on them and make them surrender please (doing it from orbit optional).

If the intent is not to deter piracy, what are they educating the public about? How to rip their disks to avoid the warning?

There must be an enormous cost associated with this - 20 seconds multiplied by every time a DVD is played sounds like a lot of wasted time, and according to ICE, it's not even supposed to deter piracy. So what's the point?

It'll probably get lost in the junk down here, but I was curious just how many human life equivellents was being sapped by these inane ads. If you look up the 2011 sales figures, the top 100 DVDs sold 147 million copies. Assuming each was watched only once, and by one person, the anti-piracy warnings waste a total of 93.27 years of human life per release-year (6.33775293*10^-7 Year Waste/DVD * ~147 million DVD/Release Year).

I'm comfortable with that dimensional analysis. Easy peezy. I'm less sure about the power consumption of warning: 20 seconds at 35 watts (A typical DVD player) would be 700 watt seconds. That times 147 million would come out to around 28.58 Megawatt Hours a year. That seems a bit much, though, so I may have made a mistake there. The average home supposedly uses around 11 megawatt hours a year. At 11 cents a kw/hr, that's 3,144.16666 dollars.Now I'm not sure how to price leisure time, but I think the right economic thing to do would be to assume it's worth greater than or equal to the alternative activity (earning whatever per hour). I don't know what that number is, so I'm just going to assume it's a buck fifty arbitrarily. I don't think I could find many people to sit willing to sit being bored for 1.50 an hour, but I don't have time to dig through the lit to find a better one. At 1.50 an hour, the 20 seconds waste around 1.22 Million Dollars a year. which is a fair bit than the 3.1 Thousand dollars wasted electricity.

For those who must know, 93.27 years is 0.000213 Library of Congress equivalents, assuming you can read one book a week.

Here in the Netherlands, where it is perfectly legal to download a movie (can't upload though) we have these since VHS...
First a FBI warning, an institute that as absolutely no rights or business here, then a RIAA warning (again, no business here) and then the Dutch 'Brein' Warning...
And then a couple of trailers I have on interest in... All in all you're going to lose between 5 and 10 minutes of your life being told lies that piracy is stealing (which of course it isn't)
Man, I the only movie I ever bought was the Godfather collection, v2000, VHS and DVD... Because those are the only 3 movies good enough to tolerate that shit! (Although in practice, I just watch the torrent....)

These are different than the ones you're talking about. It seems they've caught on to the workaround of "put the disk in, go make some popcorn / get a beer / take a piss, come back and press 'play movie'". So these will appear after you press 'play movie'. Even more obnoxious. If I were running the pirate bay I'd send them a nice thank-you letter.

put a one time use web entered data key at the end of OPTIONAL previews for a 50% discount on a future movie ticket (only valid on some movies, like the ones the expect to bomb anyways and need extra audience).

This says a) thanks for buying the disk, and b) thanks for watching the OPTIONAL previews.

It would make the buyer feel good and it would get them extra audience for normally losy movies. And it would get them web registrations of users. ((I hate doing the registration stuff, so mine would end up unused or I would pass the number to someone else, but I would still feel good about it rather than the current system))

I wish someone would craft a carefully worded Proposition for California which would make any unskipable content on media which is sold or rented unconstitional... Something about not being allowed to accuse people of crimes without evidence that they are at least thinking of committing the crime.

It would make for such a fun round of election ads - the more the studios argue that it is a good thing the more the population would be reminded just how irritating these warnings are.

I'm not in the USA, yet I have to sit through FBI warnings on every DVD or Blu-ray I purchase. Yes, they're impressive official seals and look very threatening, but the FBI has absolutely no jurisdiction in this country. Why on earth don't they edit the bloody things out?!

So I'm sorry because I know what's ahead of you. And you know, it's not the waiting that is annoying. It is the fact that I bought a DVD with *my* money thereby (at least I believed) owning it, and yet I am being forced to watch something I would prefer to skip. Again and again and again. If you are one of the people here who thinks it won't be annoying, then speak to me in a year's time when you've seen the same damn message 500 times.

To the idiots who decided to put these messages up in the first place: Nothing makes me want to pirate more than these messages. I am not pro-pirate, but you are making your product *worse* than I can get for free. Why make people who are doing the right thing already sit through a bunch of your preachy bullshit?

My old copy of Demolition Man on DVD has this stuff right. You put it in, the movie starts. There's minimal nonsense. No previews, no menus, just movie. The movie is the only thing I care about anyway, so this is great.

These days they're just annoying. As usual Hollywood is working hard to make the pirate version superior to the purchased one. They must be taking lessons from Ubisoft in how to chase off paying customers.

I'm always amused that every DVD I rent or buy in Canada has stern warnings from police forces in other countries. The day when the RCMP has their own warning before the movie is the day when I'll take it seriously.

I finally got a Bluray player last November and although I have the money to easily afford any movie I want, and would prefer to have the highest bitrate, I gave up after several movies in a row took about 5-10 minutes to start up. I even had one rental that went on for over 20 minutes. Hell, the studio identifications alone take 5 minutes. I may be willing to give the studios my money, but I can't afford to give them my time. I will not pay $40 to be annoyed when I can have the annoyless versions for free.

This puts the final nail in the Bluray coffin for me. I was on the fence and now, I will simply never buy another. Congratulations movie studios! You really know how to sell a product there.

Up until the mid-1990s, it was pretty rare [archive.org] for a movie to hit the magical $100-million mark. Then, Disney animated features started doing that pretty regularly, and after that, most big-budget films started hitting that mark pretty consistently as well.

In 2002, Spider-Man became the first movie to hit $100 million in its opening weekend. Ten years later (almost to the day) The Avengers became the first movie to hit TWO hundred million dollars on its opening weekend, and one short week later, Wikipedia tells me that its box office grosses are THREE QUARTERS OF A BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS.

I've been saying this for ten years now, but User Operation Prohibitions, just like region restrictions, on equipment that people own are simply not acceptable.

I have seen so many DVDs with unskippable previews, FBI warnings (on region 4 DVDs no less) and of course the stupid "You wouldn't steal a car.." campaign. No wonder this [netdna-cdn.com] depiction is so accurate.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised when one DVD I rented recently had just one message that lasted about 5 seconds and simply said (paraphrasing) "For supporting the movie industry, THANK YOU". Presumably this is an attempt to give warm fuzzies (positive reinforcement) for not pirating (rather than punishment for those who do). Of course that could always end up on a ripped copy anyway but that's not the piont...

I skimmed through the comments and I'd like to answer those who have the opinion that it's "just" 20 seconds, that you should get over it, that it's harder to pirate it so it's illogical.

First of all, it's not the length of time that is disturbing to me. I'm not a machine, I don't perceive every second as exactly the same amount of time. Sometimes I play a game and 3 hours go by as if it had only been 15 minutes. Sometimes I wait 15 minutes and it seems like it's been an hour. That 20 seconds of unskippable messages is disturbing because it affects the experience of watching the movie. I don't get irritated because I'm wasting 20 seconds of my incredibly precious time; I get irritated because the mega-corporation which produced this movie added an unnecessary step to watching the movie.

This isn't about how long or how short the unskippable message is. It's about the fact that it's there at all. If you accept the 20 seconds, you're saying it's okay if someone stops you for 20 seconds and makes you say "you're the boss, I'm following your orders, I won't disobey you". How would you feel if every time you went to pump gas, someone stopped you for 20 seconds and told you "it's our gas, don't steal it, alright? Swear it. Swear you won't try to steal it". And then every time you go to the grocery store, before entering, you have to stop for 20 seconds and say "I understand the food inside isn't my property. I won't try to steal it. I'll pay for it." This is what you're agreeing to if you're okay with those unskippable notices. What makes you think it won't become 30 seconds, and then eventually 40? A minute? A minute is nothing compared to 2 hours, after all. You should be able to live through that, right?

Long story short: it's not the length of the delay that's disturbing, it's the gratuitous addition of an obstacle that serves no purpose (pirates won't see it, ordinary people will just do something else until the menu appears), and it's the oppression of people's freedom to reaffirm their submission to the authorities.

We have the same stuff on french DVD, thought not on all of them : I suspect they are not mandatory. However, there is a workaround. Selecting France's french gives me the lengthy antipiracy warning, but I skip it if I select Belgian french.